Many years ago dealers typically had a constant margin on every SKU in stock. Some merchants had been increasing their margins by a few percent to account for larger freight bills or to increase net profit. As the flood of big discounters and other large inventory warehouse-type stores began to change the market, dealers of smaller stores reacted by reducing those flat store margins and found that it only significantly reduced their profit margins. Even with a reduced constant margin, the high end prices were still too high. The discounters had created their image by using very low margins on higher priced merchandise and recovered margin on the low priced stock keeping units (SKUs).
In recent years, trade journals have discussed highly sensitive prices on a few dozen SKUs. The believers of this theory state that the public has memorized the price of the leader SKUs found in the big discounters, and other stores must match these prices or be subject to "bad price image." As a result, the small store dealers have attempted to guess what those highly-sensitive SKUs are and have changed them individually on their products over and over again, depending on trade circulars and customer complaints.
Trade journals also discuss a philosophy that gross profit margins should decline as prices increase. These journals, however, do not elaborate on how to accomplish this on a typical inventory of 15,000 SKUs. Apparently, the journals discussing this philosophy believe that prices can be changed one at a time and then maintained.
Many dealers have attempted the above theories and found that they could not keep the typical systems offered by wholesalers under control. A perfectly set up system to manage prices according to these theories would slowly "slide away" from manageable pricing, because there was no underlying logic in the system to correct for the unavoidable changes in products and competition. Many of these pricing systems, for example, simply use the computer as a large electronic filing cabinet which does nothing more than store millions of little individual decisions regarding each retail price. These systems do not have the unifying thread of mathematics and logic that makes it possible to answer the question: where do retail prices come from or, more particularly, how are they logically related to customers' purchasing decisions?
These existing systems become complicated and unmanageable for small independent dealers who wish to take significant control over their own prices. They have no option except to individually price their entire inventory. Since there are inevitable changes in the merchandise, the dealers are forced into spending a large portion of their time in system maintenance due to the required individual adjustment of prices. The dealer is forced to make the same decisions over and over again in a never ending cycle. The dealers are manually attempting to adjust prices, instead of using the computer to determine a logical relationship between price and customers' purchasing decisions and automate the calculation of retail prices.